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To Increase Production, Jeter Tries Subtracting a Step

TAMPA, Fla. — Kevin Long needed a place to demonstrate Derek Jeter’s retooled hitting mechanics, so the bar area of a Bonefish Grill on Thursday night had to suffice. Long nudged aside a coffee table, assumed the hitting position — legs flexed, body squared, arms bent and out front — and moved his front foot up and down. As he pretended to swing a bat, a waitress bumped into him. Long, so engrossed in his explanation, did not seem to notice.

Long is applying that singular focus to a three-day hitting tutorial this week that is intended to help Jeter rebound after the worst offensive season of his career. In the off-season, Long regularly travels the country (and the Caribbean) instructing Yankees hitters, but for the first time he has added Tampa to his itinerary. He never had to visit because Jeter, who lives here, never needed his help.

“If he hits .320 last year, I’m not changing one thing,” Long said in the bar area. “In Derek’s case, he hit an all-time low, and this is something he felt the need to do. It’s hard for me as a hitting coach to say that I did a good job with Jeet last year. I look at it like I failed him. He’s on a mission, like he said, and so am I to get him back to where he needs to be.”

The only thing that really concerns Long is Jeter’s batting average, which plummeted 64 points last season to .270. The drops in home runs and slugging percentage, the spike in strikeouts, Long considers normal, or at least not abnormal.

If by eliminating his stride, Jeter, a .314 career hitter, can restore, say, 30 points to his average, his on-base percentage, an integral facet for a top-of-the-order hitter, will improve, too. Everything else is secondary.

Long and Jeter began working last September on refining his swing and this week they picked up where they left off. On Wednesday and Thursday mornings, the two worked for about 90 minutes in the batting cages at the Yankees’ minor league complex here, and had a final session scheduled for Friday before Long was to fly home to Arizona.

They will reconvene in the second half of February, when the most scrutinized spring training of the most scrutinized season of Jeter’s professional career will begin.

A winter simmering with contentious contract negotiations, back-and-forth sniping and a public airing of Jeter’s shortcomings will evolve into a spring fraught with concern that his diminished production is a sign of irreversible decline. That, at 36, Jeter can forget about hitting .300 again.

Long, perhaps not surprisingly, strongly disagrees with that notion. He compared Jeter to Paul Molitor, who simplified his mechanics as he got older, abandoning his stride, and found great success. At 39, Molitor hit .341 in 1996 — the year after he, too, hit .270.

“That’s why we’re fixing his stride,” Long said of Jeter. “If we can get him to be more direct to the ball, this could be scary. He’s still going to have slumps and struggle here and there, but we’re both pretty excited about what’s going on.” Molitor recorded 3,319 hits in his Hall of Fame career. Jeter has 2,926, most of which have been collected with mechanics that, according to Long, are slightly flawed. All hitters have a mechanism that they use to time pitches, and Jeter has always taken a stride toward the mound with his left leg. Long figured it would need to be addressed at some point, but for more than 15 seasons Jeter has overcome it with a preternatural ability to let the pitch travel deep and then get his hands through the hitting zone.

“It would have been asinine for me to go in and try to change him before,” Long said. “He’s been so good for so long, what really needed to be done?”

Photo

Derek Jeter, left, next to the hitting coach Kevin Long last spring. The two spent three days this week working on Jeter’s swing.Credit
Kathy Willens/Associated Press

But that stride grew longer and drifted toward the plate, which caused Jeter to lean over. It altered Jeter’s bat path, and his timing suffered.

“Now,” Long said, “he starts to get jammed a little more. Maybe his bat slows down just a hair, but that’s significant. We can say age all we want, but I’m not buying into that. I think if we fix this, that age factor dissipates.”

As Jeter’s slide carried into September, Manager Joe Girardi asked Long to intervene, telling him, “It’s hard for me to watch Derek struggle like this.” General Manager Brian Cashman agreed, asking Long whether he was planning on working with Jeter soon.

In his final at-bat, in the 12th, he failed to drive in the go-ahead run from third with one out. His average plunged to a season-low .260, and Jeter received the next night off to work in the cage with Long, who asked him to lock his stride foot in place, a method employed by Albert Pujols, and then lift it up about an inch before bringing it down in the same spot. Over his final 28 games including the playoffs, he showed progress, hitting .311, but had yet to fully adopt the technique.

“You’re not asking me to put my hands in a different spot,” Long said Jeter told him. “You’re asking me to do something with my front foot that I’ve never done before.”

So on Wednesday, they reunited for a session that, according to Long, was “pretty simple.” First, Jeter hit off a tee, which was positioned in different areas of the hitting zone. Then, Long would flip him pitches. There are other components that Long wants to tackle in the future, but he wanted Jeter to focus on gaining comfort hitting without a stride. He took about 120 swings each day, and on Thursday he told Long that he sensed a difference.

“He said, ‘K-Long, I don’t know what to do with all this extra time that I didn’t have before,’ ” Long said. “He said that he doesn’t have as many parts to get going into place before he reacts to the baseball. That’s exactly what I hoped he would say. That’s exactly right.”

If he can maximize that extra time, Long says, he expects Jeter, a superb opposite-field hitter, to become more efficient and explosive, driving balls to left and left-center. Long declined to divulge his predictions for Jeter, only that “if I told you, you’d be like, ‘Whoa!’ ” If Jeter fulfills them, Long might be able to cross Tampa off his itinerary next January. He took advantage of his time in town to visit Jeter’s new mansion, known locally as St. Jetersburg, and came away duly impressed.

“I don’t know if his swing will ever be as good as his house,” Long said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 29, 2011, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Increase Production, Jeter Tries Subtracting a Step. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe